p. 77 | WHAT IS REAL FOOD by B. W. Richardson

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Feb 3, 1887

WHAT IS REAL FOOD.

By B. W. Richardson

WE ought to learn, as a first truth, the truth that the oftener we go to the vegetable world for our food the oftener we also go to the first, and therefore to the cheapest, source of supply. The commonly accepted notion that when we eat animal flesh we are eating food at its prime source, cannot be too speedily dissipated or too speedily replaced by the knowledge that there is no primitive form of food—albuminous, starchy, osseous—in the animal world itself, and that all the processes of catching an inferior animal, of breeding it, rearing it, keeping it, killing it, dressing and selling it, mean no more nor less than additional expenditure throughout for bringing into what we have been taught to consider an acceptable form of food, the veritable food which the animal itself found, without any such preparation, in the vegetable world.

With the light of these natural facts filling the rational mind, the tendencies of all advanced scholars in thrift should be to find out plans for feeding all the community direct from the lap of the earth; to endeavor to discover how the fruits of the earth may be immediately utilized as food; and to impress science into our service, so that she, in her laboratories, may prepare the choicest viands, minus the necessity of making a lower animal the living laboratory for the sake of gratifying what is just a little higher than a cannibal propensity.—B. W. Richardson.